>Schools nationwide have invested millions of dollars in the monitoring technology, including federal COVID-19 emergency relief money meant to help schools through the pandemic and aid students’ academic recovery. Marketing materials have noted the sensors, at a cost of over $1,000 each, could help fight the virus by checking air quality.
>Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.
Imagine getting a felony as a high school senior for getting caught vaping weed by a sensor bought for a thousand bucks in COVID-19 emergency relief funds.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, about how systems of compliance breeds malcontentedness.
There's the saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely," but it's such a more boring banal inverted tyranny that allows well intended useful money to flow into such low life police state shit, and it ruins so badly the greater project & belief in doing stuff.
Cynicism seems ever on the rise, and it keeps seeming ever more warranted. More and more, nothing becomes as punk & contrarian as hopefulness & trying, in believing that we can surpass our mired shittinesses.
This is why the only viable solution to avoid tyranny is aggressive safeguarding of democratic institutions and the gradual (and continuous) alignment of laws with our actual desires as a society.
The technology for authoritarianism will continue to get cheaper and continue to proliferate. There’s no way to prevent that.
I'm pretty sure we proletariat lost on all fronts. I advocate we give up on change via text official routes (which tends to absorb as much energy as anyone can throw at the project while producing epsilon results, barring the odd tournament-market victor [Britney Spears, Neil deGrasse Tyson for examples]), and teach our children and each other the importance of undermining and subverting the dominant control structures at every turn.
> alignment of laws with our actual desires as a society.
The fact is, people desire different things from society. Some people want to have other people take control, because they believe it provides them with security. Others want total freedom and the two are completely incompatible. I think the only solution is to leave behind the old way of people staying in the nation they are born. Different nations should be allowed to have completely different policies and people should be allowed to choose which policy sets best fit with their ideology and be allowed to freely move to the nation that applies.
Getting caught breaking the rules, and possibly the law, and instead of taking responsibility she blames surveillance that amounts to little more than a smoke detector paired with camera systems that are already in place in many (most?) schools.
I'm sympathetic with arguments against a lot of the surveillance we see in schools, but it does a great disservice to the anti-surveillance position when you try to use an example where it correctly identifies genuine misconduct.
The girl in the article says that this sort of thing doesn't work, yet in the next sentence she admits that it actually did work, "I’m never going to do something like that again, because the repercussions I faced were horrible." The system correctly identified her and as a result she decided to not partake in such behavior in the future. This reads like a young kid who doesn't think her actions should have consequences.
Get real, normal consequences for tiny infractions like this should be getting yelled at by a teacher and having to deal with parents being informed. Ruining people's lives with criminal records is wildly disproportionate to the harm. Attitudes like yours are why the US is a country where I still get asked for ID to buy alcohol in a supermarket even though I'm in my 50s.
> Ruining people's lives with criminal records is wildly disproportionate to the harm.
If I understand the article correctly, it's a misdemeanor and a small fine for nicotine vapes. This is far from ruining someone's life, I know people who got misdemeanors for more serious actions and they didn't have their lives ruined. In the vast majority of cases it does not seem that this is the issue you think it is. If a student is both an adult and is using flagrantly using marijuana in a school, and likely exposing their young friends' developing brains to the substance, then it is completely on them.
> A leading provider, HALO Smart Sensors, sells 90% to 95% of its sensors to schools. The sensors don’t have cameras or record audio but can detect increases in noise in a school bathroom and send a text alert to school officials, said Rick Cadiz, vice president of sales and marketing for IPVideo, the maker of the HALO sensors.
> The sensors are marketed primarily for detecting vape smoke or THC but also can monitor for sounds such as gunshots or keywords indicating possible bullying.
Gunshot detection is unreliable [1]. I don't think detecting keywords is much more reliable. Actually, I speculate that detecting keywords is less reliable.
> But also, isn’t this a sort of victimless crime?
Smoking in buildings is not victimless compared to drinking alcohol or even smoking outside away from entrances. Secondhand smoke [1] is more dangerous than it might seem.
> It’s dragnet surveillance: there are inevitably false positives ex picked up.
False positives would only be a problem depending on how exactly the evidence is used. In the first example in the article Iglesias says she learned about the sensors in her own school when an admin came to the restroom after it was triggered. Despite it being triggered by actual vaping, she notes that the admin "ultimately let all the students go" which seems to indicate that, at that school, it wasn't being used blindly to convict students.
Could this system be abused or over relied upon? Definitely, but it doesn't seem that false positives are an issue if the school administration has appropriate standards of evidence.
What isn't clear especially is how they know which of the students in the bathroom was vaping. You could maintain plausible deniability by just only going in between classes for instance.
The American "justice" system operates as a de facto vengeance and punishment system. Thirty days in the alternative school for a student council president taking a smoke break is a ludicrous exercise of discipline and punishment merely for the sake of it.
Come on, mandatory minimum sentences for high schoolers? System of a Down was railing against this paradigm when I was a wee misanthrope and it wasn't even novel back then.
I mean, there's something to be said for letting kids get away with shit.
The old version of "actions not having consequences" was not getting caught. It can be enriching to rebel a little and get away with stuff. A lot of people grow into perfectly healthy adults and look back fondly on the stunts they pulled. Personally, I don't want my kids using any drugs but I don't think the answer is to put cameras in their rooms or supervising every play date until they're 26.
Perhaps the sensible solution is to make sure there is no system where children are getting legal charges for drug use. What an incredibly stupid system. They're kids. They are supposed to be making mistakes and learning from them in low-impact environments until they're old enough to be more responsible for their actions.
I am not surprised that kids have moved their social lives online.
When I was in high school in the 80s, there was a designated outside area that was the student smoking zone. The school newspaper office was over it and we would occasionally fire paperclips at them with rubber band slingshots. We talked about but never actually did throw water balloons down there, mostly because it seemed likely to result in violent retribution (the paper clips rarely hit their marks or garnered any reaction if they did).
One of my teachers smoked in his classroom during the lunch break and when we came into the room (we had him right after lunch), the room positively reeked of cigarette smoke. Young folks today have no idea just how wild the twentieth century was.
Smoking wasn't banned on planes till 1985. You had smoking and non-smoking sections, but they were only separated by a curtain, same with restaurants.
Edit, it was even worse:
> In 1988, airlines based in the United States banned smoking on domestic flights of less than two hours, which was extended to domestic flights of less than six hours in February 1990, and to all domestic and international flights in 2000
> Smoking wasn't banned on planes till 1985. You had smoking and non-smoking sections, but they were only separated by a curtain, same with restaurants.
Can confirm, I still remember playing with the in-seat ashtrays and my mother telling me to stop, and then the whole rigamarole with the "smoking" and "non-smoking" sections and lights.
Hell I remember my father buying Marlboro reds from an old vending machine that was entirely mechanical.
Curtain? There was no curtain. I got stuck in the smoking section once flying home from college in the late 80s and started to get sick. Fortunately the flight attendants were able to find someone in non-smoking willing to switch seats with me.
Smoking Detectors were the original surveillance tech for the last version of this vice. I’m a pretty big privacy advocate but I fail to see the issue here.
It sounds like the real issue here is the insane punishment for a single infraction.
Punishment should be proportional with the difficulty of finding the violators and enforcing the statutes.
There's far too many instances where people simply get away with smoking, so, for those instances where solid proof is available that the person did smoke, they should, indeed, be punished for violating other people's right to pollution-free air on their first offence.
Otherwise, these people will simply learn to simply avoid the spots where they could be caught and reprimanded, whilst continuing to create a nuisance elsewhere, entirely defeating the effectiveness of enforcement.
It's fun to pair this up with the article from a day ago about the air pollution over Alberta's oil sands[1]. I wonder what consequence those oil companies will face for violating our "right to pollution-free air". I would be surprised if it's even a (relative small) fine.
Dear God, we have got to let some of this go. Kids deserve a chance to be a little rascal and grow out of it. The authorities can’t even check to see if the door is actually locked until they’ve been actively murdered one by one for an hour.
This just harms kids and ruins their public record for nothing and awards lucrative contracts to these companies. Eventually kids will just switch to zyn or some other smokeless spitless product. Then what is the school going to do, full cavity search and fishhook your mouth?
I've said it before and I will continue to say it. America's "justice" system serves only to effect vengeance against those the rulemakers deem punishment-worthy.
Well the enforcement could happen at a different, more effective level of our society. It’s nontrivial to produce and mass-market nicotine products, for example.
I can't help but feel like the constant comparisons between US high schools and prisons are apt here. Monitoring students' bathroom use and threatening the kids' whole future, including criminal charges for students who are, by their own admission, legal adults - all for using a totally legal mild stimulant that has no secondhand effects on anyone else.
Maybe you can phrase your hyperbole a bit better when it comes to smoking around children.
I do not think it is an insurmountable task for a legal adult take their recreational drugs at home. Maybe legal adults can take responsibility of their future, rather than risking it on breaking rules that are pretty explicit, so much so that in any other workplace or public area that prohibits smoking incurs fines at the least, and jail time for repeat offenders.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to complain about unequal enforcement.
My workplace has a "smoking area" dedicated to drug use, and allows "smoke breaks" for the sole purpose of consuming said drugs. We have places called "bars" that exist for the sole purpose of taking drugs in public.
Are we actually giving these students equal opportunities to consume it legally, or are we saying "you're a prisoner for 8 hours, and we're going to abuse that authority to deny you any access to your perfectly legal recreational activities during that period"?
If we're going to crack down and say kids should go 8 hours without drugs, shouldn't we be OK enforcing that on the adults in the workplace, too?
Why are we holding these students to a higher standard? Why are we spending thousands of dollars on enforcing the rules for students, and nothing on the rest of society?
You make it sounds like this is a victimless crime, but it is not. It creates a nuisance for other people, and possibly even a health hazard for some. For example, many workplaces and elevators have signs prohibiting wearing perfume and cologne, yet according to your argument, it's all a totally legal substance with no secondhand effects on anyone else.
This is vaping, not smoking. Little to no nuisance to others; secondhand vape isn't really a thing, and unless the user is rude enough to literally blow it in your face, odds are you wouldn't even notice it (especially the common-in-schools jule-type vapes that produce much less actual vapor than the bulky fuckboy-type cloud machines).
Sure, it would be rude to vape in an elevator or most workplaces. But compared to a high school bathroom, the scent isn't an issue.
Readit News
>Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.
Imagine getting a felony as a high school senior for getting caught vaping weed by a sensor bought for a thousand bucks in COVID-19 emergency relief funds.
There's the saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely," but it's such a more boring banal inverted tyranny that allows well intended useful money to flow into such low life police state shit, and it ruins so badly the greater project & belief in doing stuff.
Cynicism seems ever on the rise, and it keeps seeming ever more warranted. More and more, nothing becomes as punk & contrarian as hopefulness & trying, in believing that we can surpass our mired shittinesses.
The technology for authoritarianism will continue to get cheaper and continue to proliferate. There’s no way to prevent that.
The fact is, people desire different things from society. Some people want to have other people take control, because they believe it provides them with security. Others want total freedom and the two are completely incompatible. I think the only solution is to leave behind the old way of people staying in the nation they are born. Different nations should be allowed to have completely different policies and people should be allowed to choose which policy sets best fit with their ideology and be allowed to freely move to the nation that applies.
Dead Comment
I'm sympathetic with arguments against a lot of the surveillance we see in schools, but it does a great disservice to the anti-surveillance position when you try to use an example where it correctly identifies genuine misconduct.
The girl in the article says that this sort of thing doesn't work, yet in the next sentence she admits that it actually did work, "I’m never going to do something like that again, because the repercussions I faced were horrible." The system correctly identified her and as a result she decided to not partake in such behavior in the future. This reads like a young kid who doesn't think her actions should have consequences.
If I understand the article correctly, it's a misdemeanor and a small fine for nicotine vapes. This is far from ruining someone's life, I know people who got misdemeanors for more serious actions and they didn't have their lives ruined. In the vast majority of cases it does not seem that this is the issue you think it is. If a student is both an adult and is using flagrantly using marijuana in a school, and likely exposing their young friends' developing brains to the substance, then it is completely on them.
> A leading provider, HALO Smart Sensors, sells 90% to 95% of its sensors to schools. The sensors don’t have cameras or record audio but can detect increases in noise in a school bathroom and send a text alert to school officials, said Rick Cadiz, vice president of sales and marketing for IPVideo, the maker of the HALO sensors.
> The sensors are marketed primarily for detecting vape smoke or THC but also can monitor for sounds such as gunshots or keywords indicating possible bullying.
Gunshot detection is unreliable [1]. I don't think detecting keywords is much more reliable. Actually, I speculate that detecting keywords is less reliable.
[1] https://sls.eff.org/technologies/gunshot-detection
But also, isn’t this a sort of victimless crime? Or is she, herself, the victim? It’s unclear.
Smoking in buildings is not victimless compared to drinking alcohol or even smoking outside away from entrances. Secondhand smoke [1] is more dangerous than it might seem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking
False positives would only be a problem depending on how exactly the evidence is used. In the first example in the article Iglesias says she learned about the sensors in her own school when an admin came to the restroom after it was triggered. Despite it being triggered by actual vaping, she notes that the admin "ultimately let all the students go" which seems to indicate that, at that school, it wasn't being used blindly to convict students.
Could this system be abused or over relied upon? Definitely, but it doesn't seem that false positives are an issue if the school administration has appropriate standards of evidence.
Come on, mandatory minimum sentences for high schoolers? System of a Down was railing against this paradigm when I was a wee misanthrope and it wasn't even novel back then.
The old version of "actions not having consequences" was not getting caught. It can be enriching to rebel a little and get away with stuff. A lot of people grow into perfectly healthy adults and look back fondly on the stunts they pulled. Personally, I don't want my kids using any drugs but I don't think the answer is to put cameras in their rooms or supervising every play date until they're 26.
Perhaps the sensible solution is to make sure there is no system where children are getting legal charges for drug use. What an incredibly stupid system. They're kids. They are supposed to be making mistakes and learning from them in low-impact environments until they're old enough to be more responsible for their actions.
I am not surprised that kids have moved their social lives online.
Dead Comment
One of my teachers smoked in his classroom during the lunch break and when we came into the room (we had him right after lunch), the room positively reeked of cigarette smoke. Young folks today have no idea just how wild the twentieth century was.
Edit, it was even worse:
> In 1988, airlines based in the United States banned smoking on domestic flights of less than two hours, which was extended to domestic flights of less than six hours in February 1990, and to all domestic and international flights in 2000
Can confirm, I still remember playing with the in-seat ashtrays and my mother telling me to stop, and then the whole rigamarole with the "smoking" and "non-smoking" sections and lights.
Hell I remember my father buying Marlboro reds from an old vending machine that was entirely mechanical.
It sounds like the real issue here is the insane punishment for a single infraction.
There's far too many instances where people simply get away with smoking, so, for those instances where solid proof is available that the person did smoke, they should, indeed, be punished for violating other people's right to pollution-free air on their first offence.
Otherwise, these people will simply learn to simply avoid the spots where they could be caught and reprimanded, whilst continuing to create a nuisance elsewhere, entirely defeating the effectiveness of enforcement.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39137430
So rather than introducing the equivalent of chewing gum bans like Singapore did, let’s move on.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I do not think it is an insurmountable task for a legal adult take their recreational drugs at home. Maybe legal adults can take responsibility of their future, rather than risking it on breaking rules that are pretty explicit, so much so that in any other workplace or public area that prohibits smoking incurs fines at the least, and jail time for repeat offenders.
It's really not hyperbole. It's an apt comparison.
My workplace has a "smoking area" dedicated to drug use, and allows "smoke breaks" for the sole purpose of consuming said drugs. We have places called "bars" that exist for the sole purpose of taking drugs in public.
Are we actually giving these students equal opportunities to consume it legally, or are we saying "you're a prisoner for 8 hours, and we're going to abuse that authority to deny you any access to your perfectly legal recreational activities during that period"?
If we're going to crack down and say kids should go 8 hours without drugs, shouldn't we be OK enforcing that on the adults in the workplace, too?
Why are we holding these students to a higher standard? Why are we spending thousands of dollars on enforcing the rules for students, and nothing on the rest of society?
Sure, it would be rude to vape in an elevator or most workplaces. But compared to a high school bathroom, the scent isn't an issue.